Today in Ontario: The campaign gets nasty

The Ontario election campaign saw a spate of invective Tuesday, with all three parties’ leaders accusing their counterparts of corruption, deceit and opportunism. Here’s how they each spent their day:

Progressive Conservatives

PC Leader Tim Hudak made a stop at a hair salon in Pickering this morning, where he called the Ontario College of Trades “a giveaway to union bosses” and vowed to axe the five-year-old program, arguing, “We don’t need an expensive government bureaucracy to tell people where to get their hair cut.” Speaking this afternoon near Toronto, he denied that Ernie Eves’ Tory government had left behind a $5.6-billion deficit in 2003, calling the claim “an old piece of Dalton McGuinty propaganda.”

Liberals

Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne began her day with a visit to a Catholic school in Sault Ste. Marie, where she distanced herself from a Sudbury-area Liberal candidate’s support for a merger of the Catholic and public school systems in the province. Later in the morning, she said she would keep Ontario’s public sector intact and promised that Ontario’s public sector would, after another four years of Liberal government, be “at least as big” as it is now. She also attacked NDP Leader Andrea Horwath for forcing the June 12 election, saying that Horwath “doesn’t know why she rejected the budget,” and accusing the NDP leader of “slinging mud” over the $1.1-billion gas plants scandal. Wynne travelled to Sudbury in the afternoon.

New Democrats

After yesterday’s leaders’ debate — which Hudak skipped — on northern issues, in which Horwath accused Wynne of personal complicity in the cancellation of two gas plants, she brushed off the possibility of a libel suit from the premier’s office, re-asserting her belief that “the Liberal party has been has behaving corruptly” and that Wynne is “at the centre” of the scandal. Horwath was in St. Catharines this morning and made a campaign stop in Fort Erie later in the day.